Policing The Crisis

Tiberius has just found out that the folks at We Won’t Pay For Their Crisis have organised a “Policing The Crisis” event for this Thursday, May 14,  at 7:00pm at The Common Place. It promises to be a “public forum with speakers on the G20 in London, the recent mass arrests in Nottingham, and the policing of dissent in Leeds”.

Police brutality is, of course, not a new phenomenon: Tiberius remembers well the Battle of Hessle Avenue and it appears that, even now, West Yorkshire’s Finest don’t require much of an excuse to set the dogs on someone. However, the utter disdain for the right to peaceful protest represented by the G20 police actions together with the recent Nottingham arrests, indictate a worrying trend and raise questions about how the State will seek to respond to future public unrest (of which we are going to see much in the coming months). It is, therefore,  a good sign that concerned citizens are meeting together to discuss their response; we can only hope that similar meetings are going on around the country.

Tiberius would have liked to attend, but unfortunately the group seem to have an unhappy knack of organising their meetings at the same time as The Whites’ most important home games – and preventing the personal crisis this would provoke in Tiberius Jnr. must take precedence!

An Image From The Future

This Saturday, new Leeds activist group “We Wont Pay For Their Crisis” have organised an afternoon of talks, discussions and ideas, with speakers from Greece, Italy and Iceland to be held  at The Common Place.

Tiberius says “Good idea!”

They Won’t Pay…

An interesting group has formed here  in Leeds.

Calling themselves “We Won’t Pay For Their Crisis” and describing themselves as: “a group to discuss the financial crisis and potential anti-capitalist responses in Leeds”, they have already started a train fare reduction campaign that had, until now, managed to completely pass Tiberius by.

Tiberius initial thoughts:

• the language of anti-capitalism is likely to alienate as many people as it will inspire.
• anyone seriously proposing  ‘anti-capitalist responses’ would be advised not to do it on Facebook with their names and photos (!) next to them.
• the dichotomy of ‘We Won’t Pay For Their Crisis’, may have a nice ring to it but is, in reality, fairly meaningless; the crisis (or crises if we consider the related Environmental & Energy Crises) is very much ours too.

Tiberius awaits further developments with interest.